Keywords are a gateway to understanding how a market thinks, acts and buys. They’re also the common language for most SEO and PPC teams, and a clear way of connecting revenues with their work in the eyes of upper management. This all makes keywords a natural place to begin discussing – and designing – a link building campaign.

(Note: To thank early adopters during the launch of their new Link Building Toolset, Ontolo is offering a 25% discount that ends today at 9pm PST on 4/27/2010. They’ve let us know that they will never be offering a discount like this again, and that the pricing is good for all future upgrades, price changes, etc.)

Money Keywords vs. Market Defining Keywords

First, a note on the disctintion between money keywords ($KWs) and market defining keywords (MDKWs). Most SEM teams are familiar with $KWs – those are the terms that they bid on and optimize for because prospects use them when looking for solutions to their pains. However, $KWs are not always as useful when analyzing a market for its link building opportunities. This requires market defining keywords, which are the highest-level terms used to describe a market. So, for an online golf retailer, the money keywords would look like [brand name, model number, driver]. The market defining keyword is, simply, golf and possibly golfing.

1) Identify Your MDFK and $KW SERPs Dominators

SERP dominators are the websites that consistently rank well in the SERPs for your $KWs as well as your MDKWs. Though you may think you know your primary search competitors, you’ll be surprised at the true SERPs dominators when you do a comprehensive analysis. Start with reading our guide to SERP dominator analysis here >> We created a worksheet and occurrence counting tool to help out (there’s also source code available for a tool that automates this process). The SERP dominators in your keyword market space are also excellent places to start pulling competitive backlink data, should you choose to develop a link prospect list that way.

2) MDFKs for Industry Link Opportunity Analysis

What link opportunities exist in your market? Your market defining keywords are an excellent place to start gauging opportunity. You can look for blogs: [MDFK blogs], news sites: ["MDFK news"], guest posting opportunities: [MDFK "guest post"], interviewers/ees: [MDFK intitle:interview], niche directories: ["MDFK Directory"], niche forums and community sites: [MDKW community], and industry associations if you’re in the B2B space: [MDKW association]. Search for each of these in Google and compare the number of relevant hits in the top ten. The query with the most relevant hits could be an area for you to query more deeply and begin developing a specific campaign.

3) MDFKs for Competitive Link Analysis

While surveying your industry for opportunities, keep an eye out for your competitors, as well as any of the SERP dominators you previously identified. Are their hostnames appearing in any of your result sets? Are they mentioned in the news sites you find? Are they the subjects of interviews? Track them carefully and you’ll uncover the PR and content-based link building moves of your competition. Most importantly you’ll get some great ideas on what’s working.

4) Connecting Existing Linkable Assets to Keywords

We wrote recently on link building assets, which are pages and resources on your site – and people within your organization – that are the most linkable to your market. This could be a PDF collection, a jobs listing page, coupons, or even your CEO (for interviews). The important thing is going from assets to the keywords that will help you turn up link opportunities. Start with your list of assets and then brainstorm their keywords. Then combine these keywords with your MDKWs and you should start to turn up some places to submit your assets or request that someone check them out for consideration.

5) MDKWs + Link Building Query Operators

MDKWs are crucial when conducting a thorough dig for ALL the link prospects in your keyword space. You conduct this dig by combining your MDKWs with link building queries, designed to root out opportunities based on their "footprints." We recommend the following tools for this:

SEOBook Link Suggest Tool

Link Search Tool by SoloSEO

The Ontolo Link Building Query Generator

6) Getting Your Money Keywords in Anchor Text with Guest Posts

One way to use your money keywords in linkbuiding is when you’ve decided on a guest post campaign, in which you write articles for publication on relevant sites that accept content submissions. In most cases you’re allowed a snippet of description, along with a link or two. Depending on your relationship with the publisher, you may be able to have more control over the anchor text. In some occasions they may allow you to even add links within the body text, especially if there’s a value-add reason for the links to be there.

7) Getting Money Keywords in Anchor Text with Outreach Requests

When conducting outreach you can request that people link to you with particular link text. However, unless you’re paying them, it’s not highly-likely that people will respond to your requests. It doesn’t hurt to ask, though you’re probably better off focusing on building high-trust editorial links to your site and letting your onsite SEO handle the rest!

About the Author:
Garrett French is the co-founder of Ontolo, Inc., creators of the Ontolo Link Building Toolset which uses your target keywords to find and grade link prospects. The Link Building Toolset reduces link prospecting and qualification time, letting you focus on the most valuable part of link building: relationships.

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I know, you probably are reading this post thinking—what does SEO have to do with Good Friday? Absolutely nothing as a matter of fact, but I figured I’d take advantage of today and write a little ditty about all the good things Friday brings to the world of SEO. If anything, at least you will have some sites to peruse while waiting for your 9-5′er week to end.

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Very often, people who professionally optimize websites for search engines come to a point where they focus exclusively on the big picture of site rankings and the associated link building.  While link builders can’t usually be charged with myopic vision and inflexibility in their methods, sweating the little details isn’t generally on the collective agenda either, especially when trying to promote multiple sites simultaneously.

Many times a new focused strategy or technique may not seem worthwhile because of the huge amount of top-level searching and otherwise time-consuming processes needed to begin the undertaking.  Faced with the option of using tried-and-true tactics for good rankings with the major search players or experimenting with new techniques like social media, niche marketing, local search & directories, and video optimization, many will choose to do what they’ve always done in the past simply because they know they can meet their deadlines that way.

In the long run, though, most seasoned SEOs would agree that experimentation with less-often used sites like local and niche search engines pays off in many valuable ways.  Not only is there simply more “link space” to be had by promoting a site across local search engines and other sites specifically devoted to the same vertical markets, but the act of using them for research brings up results that would otherwise remain hidden if the major search engines and common site tools are the only methods used.

Pushpins on the Map

Regardless of the global nature of the Internet, geography still plays a huge role in determining which sites get listed where.  For example, a site that has a local store and doesn’t sell their products online has no choice but to focus their web marketing on local search engines and directories, since almost all potential paying customers have to be in their city.  Using local directories for an example like that makes sense, but it makes equally good sense to use local and niche search engines and directories for a website that does every bit of their business online; it simply gives them another avenue by which to be discovered, along with precious links from generally decent and respected sites.  In addition, there are a few local business sites that don’t seem to care if the business is actually local, which means that there are some free backlinks to be had from them.

Social Connections

            By now it’s no secret that social media plays a large and steadily increasing role in many aspects of web marketing.  From the search engine side of things, they’re valuable in all the obvious ways:  Social networking platforms are often popular, regularly updated, and respected sites with an enormous amount of unique and (somewhat) organized content.  Therefore, all the normal bookmarking, voting, and commenting techniques apply well to this arena.  Beyond that, though, there’s an added benefit to having one’s content on a social media site:  A huge potential audience.  Of course, depending on what exactly is being promoted, there may not be a huge user response to whatever you’ve contributed on social sites, but that really doesn’t matter so much.  It’s great when other users are really excited about something that they’ve been informed about through the network and begin to interact, because it draws search engine attention.  If it’s at all possible, it’s wise to submit humorous or valuable content that only subtly resembles marketing material.

            By exploring the furthest reaches of the web and even some places that seem less than worthwhile, one’s SEO efforts will be improved tangibly.  Furthermore, the link builder who takes the time to do this research will certainly be exposed to different opportunities that would remain hidden if working exclusively within the confines of their historical precedent.  Make sure to stop back at this blog tomorrow for part 2 of this post, where we will take a look at some niche search engines and examine their usefulness for optimization and research.

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• The number of unique domains that are linked to that domain
• Their IP addresses and all unique C block addresses of any links
• A break-out of all links from .gov, .ac, .uk and .edu domains.
• Any domains that link from five or more pages are highlighted in bold.

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